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‘Those Organnons by which it Mooves’: Shakespearean Theatre and the Romish Cult of the Dead1
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotty and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. (Hamlet, I.v.9-20)2
… a man feels that he has a soul, and consequently a force, because he is a social being.
-
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life3
How seriously would Shakespeare have taken the notion of his theatre as a cult of the dead?
Concluding Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory, this question has in different times received
different answers.4 Suggesting the playwright took the cult of the dead very seriously, in 1745 Colley
Cibber spoke of eighteenth-century critics inferring Shakespeare’s Catholicism ‘from the solemn
Description of Purgatory given us by his Ghost in Hamlet’.5 When scholars addressed the matter in
the twentieth century, the question moved from the solemnity of the Ghost to its reliability; ‘What if
it tempt you toward the flood … draw you into madness?’ (Hamlet, I.iv.50-55).6 When in the new
1
As the O.E.D. observes, ‘Romish’ compounds ‘Roman’ with ‘Roman Catholic’ The term coming into frequent
use in the sixteenth century (the first cited example is from Tyndale, 1538), it evocatively highlights the link
between ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’ in early modern England. Like ‘catholic’ (meaning ‘universal’), the
term also encompassed some of the stranger theories at the end of this piece. Further etymological
significance emerges in my comments on Titus Andronicus below.
2
All Shakespearean quotations are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and
Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1988).
3
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: 1915; repr.1964), p. 366.
4
See Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton and Oxford, 2001), p. 258.
5
David Chandler, ‘Catholic Shakespeare: The Making of the Argument’, in English Language Notes, 44 (2006),
29-41 (30).
6
See, notably, Eleanor Prosseur, Hamlet and Revenge (London, 1967).
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millennium Peter Marshall made the problem of ‘Hamlet’s Ghost Critics’ the very problem of the
Reformation, it was clear that Shakespeare and pretty much everyone else took seriously the cult of
the dead.7 The principal remaining question was only how directly the cult bore on the theatre.
Coming to understand Hamlet’s Ghost as just one manifestation of religious practices of
commemoration that are everywhere in Shakespeare, to commentators the underpinning of much
early modern theatre by the Catholic, and to contemporaries Romish, cult of the dead is ever more
clear. The other outstanding question is how fully Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists
endorsed the cult. Starting with a localised answer, this article addresses both these far-reaching
questions. As well as evoking Purgatory, the Ghost’s address to Hamlet is already a paradigm of
theatre. Commanding attention, the Ghost speaks and performs. Being his audience, Hamlet listens
and responds.8 According to contemporary associations of Purgatory with purgation, the passage
even foregrounds explanation of how performed tales cathartically ‘harrow’ an audience.9 Hamlet’s
prime example of purgatorial cult is also a paradigm for performed action in the round. Why?
The short answer is that performance is a religious as much as theatrical activity and that
early modern England did not clearly distinguish between the theatrical forms. ‘Drama did not
simply move, as scholars once argued, from inside to outside the church. Drama we might consider
secular was sometimes performed inside churches, at least from the sixteenth century, if not before,
just as drama that we would consider religious might be performed outside churches’.10 New
theatres such as The Globe shared audiences, actors and playwrights with theatres recalling former
religious use such as The Blackfriars, and until the late sixteenth century competed and collaborated
with theatres still actively involved in religious performance such as at St Paul’s.11 From 1603, the
last performed Corpus Christi play in England is contemporary with Hamlet.12 Each theatre
competed for audiences with the popular sermons performed, for example, at Paul’s Cross. Set
speeches and responses, singing including Latin dramatizations of biblical material, ritual acts
7
For Marshall’s acknowledgement of Hamlet’s Ghost criticism prefiguring his view of the Reformation, see
Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford and New York, 2002), p.232. The phrase ‘Hamlet’s Ghost
Critics’ is Greenblatt’s.
8
For the scene as a ‘theatrical microcosm’ in this respect, see Thomas Rist, ‘Transgression Embodied:
Medicine, Religion and Shakespeare’s Dramatized Persons’, in Staged Transgression in Shakespeare’s England,
ed. by Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple, Palgrave Shakespeare Series (Basingstoke, 2013), pp.120-35 (129).
9
See Thomas Rist, ‘Catharsis as “Purgation” in Shakespearean Drama’, in Shakespearean Sensations:
Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge,
2013), pp.138-53.
10
Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre (Cambridge, 2006), p.2.
11
See Thomas Rist, ‘Shakespeare Now and Then: Communities, Religion, Reception’, in Writing and Religion in
England, 1558-1689 (Farnham and Burlington VT, 2009), pp. 114-5. For discussion of theatricality at St Paul’s
in special relation to commemorating the dead, see Rist, Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration
in Reforming England (Farnham and Burlington VT, 2008), pp.75-95.
12
For discussion of this Corpus Christi performance, see Dillon, p. 83.
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including from liturgy and the mass, characterise theatrical as well as church performances.13 Early
modern performance was simultaneously religion and entertainment. The longer answer to why the
cult of the dead becomes a paradigm of theatrical action in Hamlet is that rituals of funeral
inextricable from that cult characterised the drama long before Shakespeare’s play. Beginning with
a play in which English religious unease is the backdrop, the following section recounts the
developing linkage.14
Theatrical History: The Dead in Theatre before Hamlet
When in The Defense of Poesie Sir Philip Sidney denounced England’s pre-Shakespearean
theatre, the one play ‘of these that I have seen’ that he admired was Sackville and Norton’s
Gorboduc.15 Though he does not say so, the play’s performance at court at Elizabeth I’s request, and
its topical treatment of an England without heirs to the throne, partly explains this.16 Yet Sidney’s
emphasis on ‘funerals’ as an essence of tragedy provides further explanation.17 Although this aspect
of the document is hitherto unnoticed, the eyewitness account of Gorboduc found in the Yelverton
Collection of the British Library also notes the play was a ‘tragedie’ whose sequence of events
included an entrance of ‘mourners’.18 Interpreting the play, the eyewitness reiterates this funereal
emphasis: ‘The shadowes were declared by the chore. First to signyfie unytie. The 2. howe that men
refused the certen and tooke the uncerten, whereby was ment that yt was better for the Quene to
mary with the L.R. knowne than with the K. of Sweden. The thryde to declare yt cyvill discention
bredeth mourning’.19 According to the eyewitness, in fact, mourning is central in the three identified
ways that the play ‘signifie[s]’. It alone, notably, receives more than a single, explicit mention.
Since there are just six eyewitness accounts of London plays from 1567 to 1642, the
conjunction of mournful action with tragedy in Sidney and the anonymous Gorboduc witness is
13
Dillon, p. 1.
My method follows that proposed by Wilson-Okamura. Its aim is the ‘scholar’s task’ of grasping its subject
‘as a whole’, which will entail leaving some ‘gaps’. See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance
(Cambridge, 2010), pp. 8-11. For discussion of the religious backdrop as ‘unease’, see Henry James and Greg
Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc’, in English Historical Review (February, 1995), 109-21 (109-10 and 116-17).
15
See ‘The Defense of Poesie’, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, Oxford World Classics (Oxford, 2008), p.
243.
16
For details of this stage history, see the introduction in Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, ed. by Irby Cauthen,
Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London, 1970), pp. xi-xxx (xii-xiii). All quotations from Gorboduc are from
this edition.
17
Illustrating distinctions between comedy and tragedy, Sidney’s contrast is of ‘hornpipes with funerals’. He
considers these features in classical and English dramatic precedents. See ‘The Defense of Poesie’, p. 244.
18
Citation from Norman Jones and Paul Whitfield White, ‘Gorboduc and Royal Marriage Politics: An
Elizabethan Playgoer’s Report of the Premier Performance’, in English Literary Renaissance, 16.1 (1996), 3-17
(3-4).
19
Citation from Jones and White, p.4.
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exceptional evidence that mourning and tragedy were fundamentally interlinked in contemporary
understandings of the genre.20 That Sackville and Norton placed mournful action in a dumbshow
also merits comment: ‘in a play full of static action and long sententious speeches, these sequences
of elaborate visual spectacle and movement were the most engaging and therefore most
memorable parts of the play’ – the more so since here was ‘the first known use of dumbshows on
the English stage’.21 Projecting mourning through a dumbshow, Sackville and Norton gave it a
striking prominence: one answering to Sidney and the eyewitness’ accounts of its tragedy. As we
shall now see, the eyewitness’s ‘moral commentary’ on the dramatic meanings of the dumbshow
particularly show that besides being a ‘well-educated minor courtier’ in Norman Jones and Paul
Whitfield White’s words, he was a reliable and astute observer of Gorboduc.22
Gorboduc not only shows the mourning of the dead common in Elizabethan drama
thereafter, but in various ways it too comments on its centrality in tragedy. It does so through the
figure of the Chorus and the dumbshow separating each dramatic act. These especially make the
play not just ‘full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca’s
style’, in Sidney’s phrase, but also one ‘as full of notable morality’.23 The dramatic moralising of the
action of Gorboduc cannot be overstated. Giving unusually full descriptions of the dumbshows that
schematically precede each act, the text names each description as ‘The Order and Signification of
the Dumb Show’. Repeatedly bringing out this signification ensures an action always imbued with
moral meaning. Basing itself in moral axioms, the Chorus ending each act presents the morality in
words.
The Chorus ending Act Three therefore works in tandem with the dumbshow preceding Act
Four. Quoting the Chorus in full brings out its extensive intervention in the dramatic meaning, as
well as its means of arguing from moral maxims:
CHORUS.
The lust of kingdom knows no sacred faith,
No rule of reason, no regard of right,
No kindly love, no fear of heaven’s wrath;
20
Jones and White observe five eyewitness accounts of London drama of the period including that of the
Yelverton collection (p. 3). Sidney’s insistence that he has seen Gorboduc, and other plays, makes a sixth.
21
Jones and White, pp. 5 and 16.
22
Quotations from Jones and White, pp. 4-5. In emphasising the critical perceptiveness of the eyewitness’
moral commentary, though, my following reading differs from Jones and White. They consider the moral
commentary of the eyewitness ‘typical’, citing Simon Foreman – a haphazard commentator – as a parallel
example (Jones and White, p. 5).
23
‘The Defense of Poesie’, p. 243.
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But with contempt of gods and man’s despite,
Through bloody slaughter doth prepare the ways
To fatal sceptre and accursed reign.
The son so loathes the father’s lingering days,
Ne dreads his hand in brother’s blood to stain.
O wretched prince, ne dost thou yet record
The yet fresh murders done within the land
Of thy forefathers, when the cruel sword
Bereft Morgan his life with cousin’s hand?
Thus fatal plagues pursue the guilty race,
Whose murderous hand, imbrued with guiltless blood,
Asks vengeance still before the heaven’s face
With endless mischiefs on thy cursed brood.
The wicked child thus brings to woeful sire
The mournful plaints to waste his very life.
Thus do the cruel flames of civil fire
Destroy the parted reign with hateful strife.
And hence doth spring the well from which doth flow
The dead black streams of mourning, plaints, and woe.
Dramatic moralising here begins with the chaos falling on kingdoms where individuals lust for power
and ends with a kingdom in mourning, making political theory and funerary performance
inextricable dramatic highlights. In ‘The Order and Signification of the Dumb Show Before the Forth
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Act’ that follows immediately after, this order reverses. Instead of moving from the political to the
funerary, the dumbshow moves from the funerary to the political:
The Order and Signification of the Dumb Show
Before the Fourth Act
First, the music of hautboys began to play, during which there came forth from
under the stage, as though out of hell, three Furies, Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, clad in
black garments sprinkled with blood and flames, their bodies girt with snakes, their heads
spread with serpents instead of hair, the one bearing in her hand a snake, the other a whip,
and the third a burning firebrand, each driving before them a king and a queen which,
moved by Furies, unnaturally had slain their own children. The names of the kings and
queens were these: Tantalus, Medea, Athamus, Ino, Cambises, Althea. After that the Furies
and these had passed about the stage thrice, they departed, and then the music ceased.
Hereby was signified the unnatural murders to follow; that is to say, Porrex slain by his own
mother, and of King Gorboduc and Queen Videna, killed by their subjects.
Clad in black garments, the three furies bring to life the funeral imagery of ‘dead black streams of
mourning, plaints and woe’ concluding the Chorus. Yet by the dumbshow’s end, this imagery has
become explicitly political in the ‘signified … unnatural’ murders of Gorboduc, Videna and Porrex.
From the beginning of the Chorus to the end of the dumbshow the meta-theatrical commentary has
swirled from political theory to funerals and from funerals back again to political theory. Besides
illustrating their immediate dramatic centrality, Gorboduc here begins the process of making English
political theory and funerals inseparable on the English stage. The focus on ‘vengeance’ and ‘Fury’
points towards English revenge tragedy. The presentation of funerary remembrance as an agent in
historical development points to the history play. These forms receive significant development by
the playwrights and friends Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.24
Marlowe’s history Tamburlaine Part 2 (hereafter Tamburlaine II) has been influentially
treated as the weak follow-up to Tamburlaine, where the hero has lost his all-conquering vim.25
Comparing the dramatic Prologues of the two plays shows this is misleading. While both plays
24
For discussion of Marlowe’s friends, including Kyd, see Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life
(Basingstoke, 2000), p.47.
25
See Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 1954). The influence is
present, for example, in David Fuller’s ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volume
5: Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2, ed. by David Fuller, The Massacre at Paris, ed. by Edward Esche (Oxford, 1998),
p. xxxix. All quotations from Tamburlaine (parts 1 or 2) are from this volume.
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address brutal conquest, the Prologue to Tamburlaine promises a ‘stately tent of War’ backed by the
‘high astounding tearms’ of its hero. The Prologue to Part 2 is quite different:
The generall welcomes Tamberlaine receiv’d
When he arrived last upon our stage,
Hath made our Poet pen his second part,
Wher death cuts off his progres in his pomp,
And murderous Fates throwes all his triumphs down.
But what became of fair Zenocrate
And with how manie cities sacrifice
He celebrated her sad funerall,
Himself in presence shall at large unfold.
The first sentence addressing the audience presents Tamburlaine supplanted by death. Retaining
death’s emphasis, the second sentence initially moves away from Tamburlaine entirely, making
sacrifice and the ‘sad funeral’ of Zenocrate the emphasis, and only readmitting Tamburlaine to the
drama as its narrator. Conjuring a very different audience-response from the Prologue of
Tamburlaine, death, funeral and sacrifice are the dramatic focus of Tamburlaine II. The subtitle to
Tamburlaine II reinforces this focus. Indeed, ‘With his impassionate fury, for the death of his Lady
and Love, faire Zenocrate: his fourme of exhortation and discipline to his three sons, and the maner
of his own death’ not only makes the death-scenes of Zenocrate and Tamburlaine the centre of the
drama; in ‘exhortation’, it presents the other listed features (fury, the drama of the sons) as products
of Zenocrate’s death.26
According to the promise of Prologue and also subtitle, funeral becomes the dramatic theme
overtly with the death of Zenocrate in Act Two, Scene Four. The scene ends with Tamburlaine
mourning her:
For she is dead? Thy words doo pierce my soule.
Ah sweet Theridamas, say so no more:
26
‘Exhortation’ comes from the Latin ‘ex’ (out of) and ‘hortari’ (to urge). Thus, the urge to fury and the drama
of the sons is out of the death of Zenocrate.
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Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives,
And feed my mind that dies for want of her.
Where'er her soule be, thou shalt stay with me,
Embalmed with Cassia, Amber Greece, and Myrre,
Not lapt in lead but in a sheet of gold,
And till I die thou shalt not be interred.
Then in as rich a tombe as Mausolus,
We both will rest and have one Epitaph
Writ in as many severall languages,
As I have conquered kingdomes with my sword.
This cursed town will I consume with fire,
Because this place bereft me of my love:
The houses, burnt, wil look as if they mourn’d,
And here will I set up her statua,
And martch about it with my mourning campe,
Drooping and pining for Zenocrate.
(Tamburlaine II, II.iv.125-42)
Various points need emphasis from this speech developing the Prologue and subtitle. Rather than a
‘thirst of raigne’ as in Tamburlaine (II.vii.12), conquest and violence here become expressions of
mourning.27 This is immediate in the images of the burnt houses ‘as if they mourned’ and of
Tamburlaine’s ‘mourning camp’ on the march. According to the speech and later evidence, this
second image will be a lasting one. Extending mourning for the term of the play, and so delivering
on the subtitle’s claim that death ‘exhorts’, Tamburlaine here states that rather than burying her,
Zenocrate will accompany his march across the world. How often her hearse reappears on stage as
a reminder is unclear. With the images of the burning town and mourning army, it is certainly there
in the stage-direction of Act Three, Scene Two: ‘[Enter] TAMBURLAINE with USUMCASANE, and …
four [souldiers] bearing the hearse of ZENOCRATE, and the drums sounding a dolefull martch, the
Towne burning’. It is also there in Tamburlaine’s final request to ‘fetch the hearse of fair Zenocrate.
/ Let it be plac’d by this my fatall chair, / And serve as parcell of my funerall’ (V. iii.211-13), climaxing
the play, as he looks on the hearse, in Tamburlaine’s last speech celebrating ‘eies [that] injoy your
latest benefite’ (V.iii.225). Following its initiation in Act Two, Scene Four, the metaphor of conquest
as funeral also receives considerable elaboration:
27
For the ‘thirst of reign’ speech as exhibiting ‘many’ of the play’s ‘characteristic qualities’, see Fuller, xxxix.
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[Enter] TAMBURLAINE with Usumcasane, and his three sons …
foure [souldiers] bearing the hearse of ZENOCRATE, and the
drums sounding a doleful march, the town burning.
TAMBURLAINE. So burne the turrets of this cursed town,
Flame to the highest region of the air:
And kindle heaps of exhalations,
That, being fiery meteors, may presage
Death and destruction to th' inhabitants.
Over my Zenith hang a blazing star,
That may endure till heaven be dissolv’d,
Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs,
Threatening a dearth and famine to this land,
Flieng dragons, lightning, fearful thunderclaps,
Sindge these fair plains, and make them seem as black
As is the island where the Furies maske,
Compassed with Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon,
Because my dear Zenocrate is dead.
CALYPHAS. This Piller, placed in memorie of her,
Where in Arabian, Hebrew, Greek, is writ
This towne being burnt by Tamburlaine the great,
Forbids the world to build it up again.
AMYRAS. And here this mournful streamer shall be plac’d,
Wrought with the Persian and Egyptian armes,
To signify she was a princesse borne
And wife unto the Monarke of the East.
CELEBINUS. And here this table as a Register
Of all her virtues and perfections.
TAMBURLAINE. And here the picture of Zenocrate,
To shew her beautie, which the world admired.
Sweet picture of divine Zenocrate,
That, hanging here, will draw the Gods from heaven:
And cause the stars fixt in the Southern arke,
Whose lovely faces never any viewed
That have not passed the centre's latitude,
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As pilgrims travel to our Hemi-sphere,
Only to gaze upon Zenocrate […]
(Tamburlaine II, III.ii.1-42)
Reiterating the funereal image of the burnt-black landscape, in this dialogue Tamburlaine initially
also repeats both his and the subtitle’s logic of conquest: ‘Because my dear Zenocrate is dead’.28
Implying the use of material memorials onstage, Calyphas then alludes to ‘this pillar, placed in
memory of her’ commemorating Zenocrate and the rationale of conquest, and there are further
commemorative materials in the mournful streamer, ‘table’ registering her virtues and a ‘picture of
Zenocrate / To show her beauty’. As part of the wider treatment of conquest as funeral, this
unusually developed and also focused use of stage-properties transforms the procession of victories
originating in Tamburlaine into one vast funeral procession. While Tamburlaine in broad terms
proposes a human triumph over death, Tamburlaine II returns drama to its ritual origin in funeral.
A parallel process is visible in Kyd’s revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy, where Hieronimo
also keeps a beloved family-member unburied to the end. Though they are even more sustained, his
laments emphasising personal suffering recall Gorboduc more than Tamburlaine II, but the dramatic
motif of the corpse preserved from burial until the denouement shows a collaboration of ideas
between Marlowe and Kyd. In The Spanish Tragedy, the unburied family-member is a son, Horatio,
rather than a wife, and remaining a corpse to the end, the son does not receive even the partialritual of a hearse accorded to Zenocrate. Yet the conjunction of withheld funeral ritual with bloodthirstiness, in which violent language and action expresses a memorial process simultaneously the
dramatic procession of events, corresponds in each play. As Tamburlaine produces Zenocrate’s
hearse before dying, therefore, Hieronimo produces his son’s corpse:
I see your looks urge instance of these words.
Behold the reason urging me to this!
Shows his dead son.
See here my show; look on this spectacle!
(The Spanish Tragedy, IV.iv.86-8)29
28
As noted, the play’s subtitle said fury arose ‘for the death of his Lady’.
All quotations from The Spanish Tragedy are from The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, ed. by Clara Calvo
and Jesus Tronch, Arden Early Modern Drama (London, 2013).
29
11
Since The Spanish Tragedy begins with Andrea’s ‘rights of funeral not performed’ (1.i.21-2), the
action of both plays is framed by burial. Tamburlaine’s arrangement of hearse and throne indicates
the art involved. As a ‘parcell’ of his funeral (V.iii.213), the arrangement is as wrapped-up as a body
in a cloth and as closed as a corpse in a coffin. In Tamburlaine II, this is the arrangement of the
dramatic end, the close of events. Yet it is even more suggestive for The Spanish Tragedy, where the
show of the corpse exists in a wider show that is itself the show of Andrea and Revenge, and where
the action begins and ends in narratives of life underground. Parcelling, here, is a claustrophobic
principle of organisation, where the ‘endless tragedy’ (IV.v.48) is being continually wrapped up for a
funeral.
I have argued for a collaboration of ideas of funerary theatre in Tamburlaine II and The
Spanish Tragedy, but setting the stage for debate, the plays diverge over funerary religion.
Tamburlaine’s allusion to ‘as rich a tombe as Mausolus'’, where he and Zenocrate ‘will rest and have
one Epitaph / Writ in as many severall languages / As I have conquered kingdomes with my sword’
(Tamburlaine II, 134-6) has three important functions for the ensuing action. First, it associates the
epitaph over the tomb with the babble of Roman Catholicism in its Protestant guise as Babylon,
making Catholic memorial, particularly associated with prayer for the purgatorial dead, an
incoherence.30 Second, it transforms the ensuing conquests leading to Babylon into his and
Zenocrate’s material epitaph, where the many voices of the conquered cultures evidence the
memorial incoherence. Third, it anticipates Tamburlaine’s death, where Zenocrate’s corpse is a
reminder of the ordained funeral and ‘here … all things end’. (Tamburlaine II, V.iii.250)). Funeral
babble leading to Babylon brings us to the Apocalypse, in a coherent sweep of dramatized
Protestant propaganda.31 This is not to say that Tamburlaine’s empire is straightforwardly a Catholic
one or that the play is straightforwardly anti-Catholic. Though its mixed religious signals extend
incoherence beyond the funerary, they do not do so coherently.32 Making the dramatic bête noire
the Catholic ritual for the dead, what is coherent is the association of dramatic action with funeral
and this association with Babylon’s end of days.
This is in sharp contrast with The Spanish Tragedy, where Babylon receives no mention and
is certainly not a geographical locus. It has been suggested that Hieronimo stating his play ‘Soliman
and Perseda’ will be performed in sundry languages means it was so-performed, signalling Babylon.
30
For discussion of contemporary associations of prayer for the dead and purgatory, see especially Marshall,
Beliefs.
31
Marlowe probably knew Foxe’s Acts and Monuments from its second edition. See Fuller, p. xxiii.
32
For Protestant and Catholic influences on Marlowe in the Tamburlaine plays, see Fuller, p. xxiii. Jeff Dailey
observes ‘several … religious messages’ in Tamburlaine II in ‘Christian Underscoring in Tamburlaine the Great,
Part II’, in The Journal of Religion and Theatre, 4.2 (Fall, 2005), 146-159 (147).
12
Yet at best the signal is indirect, and as Mulryne notes, the reading only has purchase ‘if the play was
indeed performed in “sundry languages”’.33 What Johnson identified as an ‘unusual’ editorial
interpolation claiming various languages for ‘Soliman and Perseda’s’ original performance makes this
suspect, especially since the playlet is integral in the larger drama and understanding it is
important.34 Since the interpolation itself presents understanding the playlet as necessary, it is
safest to assume the playlet was performed in English, as the text presents it.35 It has recently been
argued that the play only became anti-Catholic in its later rather than original performances, and
that Elizabethan Hispanophilia presents as relevant a context for the play as Elizabethan
Hispanophobia.36
The funerary contrast is also sharp in the plays’ presentations of obligations to the dead,
which we have seen divided Protestants from Catholics. From its first induction, funerary obligation
to the dead is central to The Spanish Tragedy, when delineating supernatural laws for the play, the
Ghost of Andrea says ‘my rites of burial not performed, / I might not sit amongst his [Charon’s]
passengers’ (I.i.21-2). The phrase delineates as a supernatural law that funerals benefit the dead,
and that to lessen their suffering, the living must complete the funerals of the dead. Drawing this
supernatural line in a Virgilian context in which English contemporaries recognised Purgatory, the
idea of a complete funeral implies a Catholic one, in view both of Spain and of the brevity of the
funerary rite of The Book of Common Prayer by traditional standards.37 Implicit in the benefits the
living bestow on the dead are the ties of friendship that defined medieval ideas of community.38
These ties become explicit in Horatio’s claim to have recovered Andrea’s corpse in battle, sighing
and sorrowing ‘as became a friend’ (I.iv.37). They are writ larger in Isabella’s speeches of mourning
for her son, and still larger in those of Hieronimo, kith and kin equally emphasising the bonds of
community as those of affect:
33
J.R Mulyrne, ‘Nationality and Language in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’, in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s
Time, ed. by Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 87-105 (93).
34
See S.F. Johnson, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited’, in Essays in Shakespeare and Elizabethan
Drama in Honour of Harding Craig, ed. by Richard Hosley (London, 1963), pp. 23-36 (23).
35
Rist, p. 39.
36
Eric Griffin, ‘Ethos, Empire, and the Valiant Acts of Thomas Kyd’s Tragedy of “the Spains”’, in English Literary
Renaissance, 31.2 (Spring 2001); and Griffin, ‘Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the Revised Spanish Tragedy’,
English Literary Renaissance, 39.2 (Spring, 2009).
37
For discussion of early modern readings (following Augustine) of Virgil’s underworld as Purgatory, see
Wilson-Okamura, pp, 173-8. Critics who have read Kyd’s underworld in these terms include Lucas Erne,
Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester, 2002), p. 53; Lorna Hutson,
The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2007), p. 280.
Rist, Revenge Tragedy, pp. 31-3.
38
For detailed discussion of this point first raised by Eamon Duffy, see Lucy Wooding, ‘Remembrance in the
Eucharist’, in The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation,
ed. by Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist, Material Readings in Early Modern Culture (Farnham and Burlington
VT, 2013, pp.19-36.
13
HIERONIMO: Here, Isabella, help me to lament,
For sighs are stopped, and all my tears are spent.
[…]
ISABELLA: O gush out, tears, fountains and floods of tears!
Blow, sighs, and raise an everlasting storm,
For outrage fits our cursed wretchedness! (The Spanish Tragedy, II.iv.36-46)
Just as it earlier ‘became’ the friend, mourning the dead here ‘fits’ the parents. Just as mourning
from the induction must be complete, so it here opposes truncation. The result is the picture of a
society whose shared belief is in the unadulterated performances of funeral rituals. Extending from
the audience of Andrea’s ghost to the theatrical audience in its ambit, the affirmed social value
extends to us.
The strength of this affirmation is clear in its contrast with Tamburlaine II. Instead of a
communal value affirmed by a succession of characters, in Marlowe’s play mourning the dead is
Tamburlaine’s idiosyncratic preoccupation. The idiosyncrasy emerges in various ways. While both
plays affirm the ‘everlasting’ possibilities of outrage, Tamburlaine’s rage in mourning, spilling across
borders to annihilate cities and armies, reveals how strictly limited Hieronimo’s aggression is. In
Tamburlaine II, the whole world can burn for one person. By contrast, The Spanish Tragedy’s
presentation of mourning is proportionate. Horatio mourns for Andrea. Bel-Imperia mourns for
Andrea. Hieronimo and Isabella mourn for Horatio, their son. Each act of mourning denotes a
symmetrical relationship alien to Tamburlaine’s burning grief, and for all the hyperbole, Hieronimo’s
final destruction is relatively small-scale.39
That is a comparative analysis, but Tamburlaine II bears out the claim in particulars. From
the Prologue, the play expresses a lack of conviction in its funerary presentation. Introducing the
topic after Tamburlaine’s ‘pomp’ (Prologue, 4) with a conjunction (‘But’) is weak and the whole
introduction of the theme by the Prologue is bathetic. When the Prologue invites Tamburlaine to
reveal the sacrifices of Zenocrate’s funeral ‘Himself … at large’, it abnegates responsibility for the
funeral while introducing it, in an act of carelessness the play compounds by making Orcanes, not
Tamburlaine, come forward. As we have seen, the funerary theme itself then only comes to the
39
Hieronimo’s methodical search for evidence amid his grief is relevant here. See G.K. Hunter, ‘Ironies of
Justice in The Spanish Tragedy’, in Renaissance Drama 8 (1965), 89-104.
14
fore in Act Two, Scene Four. The result is a funerary theme simultaneously central and
underwhelming that is found consistently wanting before it has begun.
When in Act Two, Scene Four the theme arrives, the idiosyncrasy of Tamburlaine is at its
height. After the thirty-seven lines hymning ‘divine Zenocrate’ with which Tamburlaine opens the
scene, his bathetic question ‘how fares my fair Zenocrate?’ receives the most bathetic of responses:
I fare, my Lord, as other Empresses,
That when this fraile and transitory flesh
Hath suckt the measure of that vitall aire
That feeds the body with his dated health,
Wanes with enforced and necessary change. (Tamburlaine II, II.ii.42-6)
This is a polite way of saying ‘wake up, and smell the coffee’, but immediately and until the
end of the scene Tamburlaine refuses its analysis of reality with ever grander and more deluded
gestures. Theridamas makes the point: ‘Ah, good my Lord, be patient, she is dead, / And all this
raging cannot make her live’ (Tamburlaine II, II.iv.119-20). Since it follows immediately after,
Tamburlaine’s determination to turn the world funerary-black in memory of Zenocrate is at odds
with Zenocrate and Theridamus’ assertions of the real, making him idiosyncratic even as their
bathetic interventions undercut his pathos. Commemorating Zenocrate through world annihilation
is in equal measure mad, in two of the senses in which contemporary drama plays with the term:
angry and insane.40 In stark contrast with The Spanish Tragedy, where the two senses are in play,
but where a relatively-circumscribed outrage allegedly ‘fits’ a loved one’s mourning and also more or
less fits it in upshot, Tamburlaine II goes out of its way to ensure funerary affect is beyond the pale.41
Perhaps the action following Act Two, Scene Four somewhat redeems the affect by making it a ‘new
normal’, as psychologists say; or rather by asserting an old normal, since violence is a celebrated
norm of Tamburlaine Part 1.42 Relevantly, too, the extremity of Tamburlaine’s mourning for
Zenocrate, being idiosyncratic by the standards of the play until Act Two, Scene Four as well as by
40
The O.E.D dates the definition 4 of ‘mad’ as ‘insane, crazy, mentally unbalanced’ back to 1330, citing The
Comedy of Errors as a contemporary, dramatic example. It dates definition 6b (‘angry, irate’) back to 1400,
with many early modern examples, including from the Great Bible (1539) and the King James Bible (1611).
Though no dramatic example is cited in this category, the Shakespearean instance of definition 1 (‘Of an
animal: abnormally aggressive’) applies the sense to a human: ‘The venome clamours of a iealous woman,
Poisons more deadly then a madd dogges tooth’ (The Comedy of Errors, V.i).
41
For discussion of this ‘upshot’, see Rist, Revenge Tragedy, pp. 41-3.
42
See for example, Eric Maisel, ‘The New Normal: Mental Health in the Context of Inevitable Struggle’, in
Rethinking Psychology: Psychology Today (February, 2013).
15
the religiously-varying norms of the period, moderates the satire of Babylonian funerary ritual in
Catholicism. His final words are replete with paradox:
Farewel my boies, my dearest friends farewell,
My body feeles, my soul doth weepe to see,
Your sweet desires depriv’d my company,
For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die.
(Tamburlaine II, V.iii.246-8)
By contrast with The Spanish Tragedy, where true to the promise of storms that are ‘everlasting’
Hieronimo’s destruction in Spain provokes more, overt mourning, the grief here is curtailed and
evasive.43 Though the body feels grief, it contrasts with the soul, where grief is visible, suggesting
that these words apart, the body – all we can see of Tamburlaine – expresses no grief. Yet the
elegiac farewells accompanying the weeping of the soul acknowledge grief, leaving this culmination
of the funeral performance begun in Act Two, Scene Four uncertain. Is this the incoherence of
Babylon finally affirmed according to the play’s satirical strand, or a grandeur before death affirming
the hero’s tragedy that overturns satire? There is no direct answer. Yet closing with a death of
Tamburlaine set against the friends and children he leaves behind emphasises the division of the
living from dead at the heart of Reformation differences of commemoration. Allowing the
Apocalypse to register either Protestant propaganda or a hyperbole of grief suggesting Catholic,
commemorative largesse, the play closes in religious dilemma. Since despite commemorative
differences Protestants and Catholics both felt the loss of loved ones, one effect of the uncertainty
may be diminishing religious oppositions.
The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine II were hugely successful in their era. Taken with the
court-endorsed Gorboduc acclaimed among others by Sidney, they set the stage for an Elizabethan
and later drama widely concerned with commemorating the disputed dead of the Reformation. To
these three can be added another hugely popular play, Titus Andronicus. The relevant, major
innovations of this play are aligning funeral controversy with ‘popish tricks and ceremonies’ explicitly
(V.i.76); accentuating the ancient Rome and Roman Catholic connotations in ‘Romish’ through their
simultaneous performance; making Rome personify mourning (I.i.70); very substantially enlarging
the justification of immoderate grief found in The Spanish Tragedy; underlining the arguments for
grief with negative images of restricted funerary ritual, where the ritual is either a punishment or
43
For discussion of how mourning in Kyd ‘survives the play’, see Rist, Revenge Tragedy, p. 40.
16
insult; and aligning the blood and paste through which Titus redeems Rome with a ‘coffin’ (V.ii.187),
creating a link precisely sacramental, since altars (unlike Protestant communion tables) traditionally
contain the bodies of saints.44 Yet Gorboduc and Tamburlaine II also point in the direction of the
history play. The significant dramatic development requires attention.
Theatrical History 2: Histories
With its simultaneous connotations of ‘story’ and ‘history’ in the period, the term ‘Histories’, devised
by John Heminges and Henry Condell in the First Folio, testifies to the interaction of what we today
call the history play with other contemporary dramatic genres. Yet Heminges and Condell clearly
understood the past as having special prominence in the plays. Their implicit recognition that the
genre concerned the dead is explicit in Thomas Nashe’s recollection of I Henry VI, in the context of
plays ‘for the most part borrowed out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers’ valiant
acts, that have lain long buried in rusty brass and worm-eaten books, are revived’:
How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had
lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the Stage, and have his
bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times),
who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!45
According to the funerary metaphors and the rich understanding of impersonation, in which both
Talbot and his actor triumph on the stage, I Henry VI was a lively encounter with the dead. If that
gets lost in abstract phrases like ‘history play’ or ‘the past’, Nashe reminds us that the dead are
history’s content.46 The description also makes the actor the commemorator of history, meaning
both performer and narrative in the history play is commemorative. While the plays treated
hitherto make remembering the dead a development of narrative, the implication is that
commemoration of the dead (both presentation of the dead and its re-presentation by
commemorative performers) defines the genre.
This is also the implication of the history plays themselves, which move forward by looking
backward, making the actor a commemorator and making audiences his commemorative observers.
Every history play except Henry V begins with a backward glance, which normally takes the form of a
44
For detailed discussion of these points, see Rist, Revenge Tragedy, pp. 44-60. The observation of
sacramentality, though, is new. For these connotations in ‘Romish’, see O.E.D. definitions 1 and 2.
45
See ‘The Defense of Plays’ in ‘Pierce Penniless’, in Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller and Other
Works (London, 1972; repr. 1985), pp.112-4.
46
See especially Robert Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago and London, 2003).
17
commemorated death. The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and
Lancaster begins with the ‘grief / Your grief, the common grief of all the land’ at the passing away of
Henry V with his French legacies, Anjou and Maine (2 Henry VI, I.i.73-4). The True Tragedy of Richard
Duke of York and the Good King Henry the Sixth initially follows with battle, blood and the lofted
head of the Duke of Somerset. In an image of the dead giving birth to the future, Richard throws the
head down saying ‘Thus do I hope to shake King Henry’s head’ (3 Henry VI, 1.1.20). Foregrounding
the funerary theme, The First Part of Henry the Sixth – probably written after the two other plays –
opens with Henry V’s funeral, which makes funeral the premise of the sequence. Especially since his
image of the risen Talbot recalls one of ‘Henry’s corpse … burst[ing] his lead and rise[n] from death’
(I Henry VI, I.i.62-4), Nashe’s analysis of Shakespeare’s history as a dramatic resurrection was
precise.47
With greater or lesser funerary emphasis, other history plays give the past similarly
commemorative forms. Richard II opens with ‘Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster’ (Richard
II, I.i.1). Richard III opens with a ‘buried’ past, where ‘arms are hung up for monuments’ (I.i.4; 6).
Henry IV, opens with King Henry on England’s ‘blood’ (I.i.6) spilt in the ‘intestine shock’ of civil war
(I.i.12). 2 Henry IV brings Rumour with true and false commemorations of Shrewsbury Field. In this
context, the innovation of the Chorus of Henry V, focusing on imagining the living king, stands out.
Harry, who in the Chorus does not emerge from a past but is instead ‘like himself’ (I.i.5), is a fresh
start. Nevertheless, Act One, Scene Two delves deep into his heredity, over which the ensuing
drama is a battle. Its conclusion is Shakespearean commemoration at its most formal:
Do we all holy rites:
Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum,
The dead with charity enclosed in clay
(Henry V, IV.viii.122-24).
As nation and religion earlier merged in Henry’s commemoration of the day of St Crispin, history and
heredity here merge with the grand funerals of Roman Catholicism. At England’s high watermark in
the cycle and the play’s soberest moment of triumph, Henry V claims the commemorative unity of
its historical and temporal, funerary and religious modes.48 Returning to lineage in the marriage to
Catherine in Act Five and then looking beyond Henry’s death, temporal history seems one long
47
Nashe, it seems, substituted Shakespeare’s image of Henry rising from his tomb for an image of Talbot doing
so.
48
My reading of Henry V here develops that of Philip Schwytzer in Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early
Modern England and Whales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 126-51.
18
funeral in preparation. Next to the emergence of plays of violent commemoration including
Tamburlaine II and the revenge tragedies, the emerging history play, as written by Shakespeare and
interpreted by Nashe, Heminges and Condell, contributes pointedly to the early modern association
of theatre and Rome’s cult of the dead. By the time of Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five, that connection
was thoroughly established. The remaining question for the scene is the presence of the Ghost.
Since in the scene’s presentation of actor and audience the Ghost provides narratives preoccupying
Hamlet, the question is important. Why does Shakespeare equate his religious ghost with narrative
in Hamlet? What precedents for this exist? In providing an answer, I shall move between the plays
already considered, treating them each as ‘history’ according to the term’s early modern
connotations of narrative and narrative especially concerned with temporal events.49
Spirits of History
Hamlet, Act One, Scene Five is not the play’s first association of narrative and ghost. In Act One,
Scene One, Horatio proposes he, Francisco and the sentinels sit to hear Barnardo’s ‘story’ (I.i.30) of
the Ghost’s appearance, so that it is into a story-telling tableau that the Ghost enters, linking him
with narrative twice. Since in Act One, Scene One and Act One Scene Five, the Ghost also evokes the
past (indirectly or directly), we may speak with Derrida-inspired critics of Shakespeare’s
hauntology.50 Yet early modern examples of the haunting past are both more personal and more
overtly literary than Spectres of Marx or The Haunted Stage allow. ‘As the soul of Euphorbus was
thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued
Shakespeare’.51 Like the two scenes from Hamlet, Francis Meres’ consideration of Venus and Adonis
twice presents a dead soul as the source of later human agency, making animation (from the Latin
anima or soul, but having the sense of ‘living’) a matter in which the dead are the soul of liveliness,
in narrative as more generally.52
Evoking the dead as what lives, and being key in good theatre, ‘animation’ bears emphasis.
The Ghost’s claim that his story could ‘freeze thy young blood’ (I.v.16) educes early modern Galenic
49
The treatment is also in line with the inclusivity of early modern dramatic presentations of genre. For
discussion, see Dillon, 141-71.
50
Derrida’s prime example of history haunting the present is Hamlet’s Ghost. See Specters of Marx: the State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London,
1994), p. 1. Derrida and Hamlet’s Ghost are acknowledged as inspirations in Marvin Carlson’s wide-ranging
study of theatre’s spectral functioning in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor,
2003).
51
Francis Meres’ famous comment on Venus and Adonis (1598).
52
For ‘anima’ as ‘soul’, see the O.E.D. etymology for ‘anima’. Interestingly, ‘anima’ contrasts with ‘animus’,
these being the irrational and rational parts of the soul respectively. The O.E.D. also traces the etymology of
‘animation’ from Classical Latin, meaning ‘form of life’, through various early modern examples. Definition 4
specifically pertains to ‘Senses relating to life, quickening, bringing into action’.
19
physiology, in which spirits, described by Gail Paster as the ‘energetic faculties … that make the body
move and feel’, animate bodies.53 The ghostly play on ‘spirits’ – both personal and medical –
underlines the importance of animation in the scene, especially in its causes. What animates
Hamlet, causing him to act? Is it a spirit from the dead or of his physiology? Recent readings of
Hamlet as also of the epoch suggest one cannot affirm either cause without affirming the other,
since medicine and religion in the pre-Cartesian, ‘Galenic moment’ were inter-dependent.54 At root,
the cause is theological, since as Paster observes, discussions of physiological spirits even among
more materially-minded medical theorists were implicitly a ‘celebration of pneuma’s breakaway
force’.55 Yet as important as the First Cause are the causal links between it and Hamlet. According
to the scenes, those links take two forms: the Ghost and the narratives of the past. The implication
is not only that ghost and historical narrative are the same, and that these are bound up with
Purgatory and purging, but also that these ghosts animate history. That is a claim very close to
Nashe’s indication that in the Histories the dead ‘triumphe againe on the Stage’, in his analysis of I
Henry VI. What other dramatic precedents for the claim that narrative is a mysterious ghost exist?
An answer is already in Gorboduc, where the ‘Order and Signification of the Dumb Show
Before the Fourth Act’ explains introducing the Furies and the dead: ‘Hereby was signified the
unnatural murders to follow’ (Order and Signification, 13). Spirits stand for narrative in this
authorised explanation, particularly a fictional narrative of historical events to come, showing the
ghost-as-narrative motif was flexible long before Shakespeare. The Spanish Tragedy places the motif
front and centre: the opening narrative is spoken by the Ghost of Andrea and recounts his history,
making the Ghost the voice of history, while also making history the content of the ghost. Since
understanding The Spanish Tragedy’s plot depends on the speech, the ensuing drama, overseen and
eventually ended by the Ghost, equates dramatic narrative, in this case a fictional presentation of
history, with the dead.
Tamburlaine II presents physiological spirits instead of ghosts. Physicians surround
Zenocrate and also Tamburlaine’s deathbeds, and ‘spirits’ are the centre of their practice:
53
See Gail Paster, ‘Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body’, in The Body in
Parts: Fantasies of Corporality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London, 1997),
107-28 (111). For discussion of Hamlet’s ‘young blood’ in terms of physiology, see Rist, ‘Catharsis as
“Purgation” in Shakespearean Drama’, p.149.
54
For detailed discussion of the ‘Galenic moment’ in these terms, see Charles Parker, ‘Diseased Bodies, Defiled
Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation’, in Renaissance Quarterly 67.4 (Winter, 2014),
1265-97, especially p. 1269. For analysis of Hamlet in these terms, see Rist, ‘Catharis as “Purgation”’ and
‘Transgression Embodied’.
55
Paster, ‘Nervous Tension’, p.115. Explicitly for the author of the Novum Organum [sic.] Francis Bacon, all the
universe besides the ‘passive’ earth consists of ‘pneumatic matter’. See ‘3.3. Matter Theory and Cosmology’
under ‘Francis Bacon’, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francisbacon/ (accessed, 18.6.2015).
20
PHYSICIAN. I view’d your urine, and the Hipostasis
Thick and obscure doth make your danger great.
Your vains are full of accidentall heat,
Whereby the moisture of your blood is dried.
The Humidum and Calor, which some holde
Is not a parcell of the Elements,
But of a substance more divine and pure,
Is almost cleane extinguished and spent,
Which, being the cause of life, imports your death.
Besides my lord, this day is Criticall,
Dangerous to those whose Chrisis is as yours:
Your Arteries, which alongst the vains convey
The lively spirits which the heart ingenders,
Are parcht and void of spirit, that the soule,
Wanting those Organnons by which it mooves,
Cannot indure by argument of art.
Yet if your majesty may escape this day,
No doubt, but you shal soon recover all. (V.iii. 82-99)
The detailed and final medical analysis goes to the heart of the liveliness of Tamburlaine, who is
animated or dead according to a rationale in which spirits move the soul. The analysis defines the
play’s idea of humanity, making the life of the soul the definition of living, and explaining action and
so theatre as the soul’s visible manifestation. Although there are no ghosts in Tamburlaine II, the
souls traditionally emerging as ghosts at death are essential.
Those inner spirits are also in The Spanish Tragedy, most obviously in the Ghost of Andrea’s
introduction of his ‘soul’ as the ‘eternal substance’ that ‘Did live imprison’d in my wanton flesh /
Each in their function serving the other’s need’ (I.i.1-3). Yet the inner spirits equated with action are
almost as evident in Revenge, who is both a personified feeling (‘vengefulness’) and a personified
action. The opening of The Spanish Tragedy turns the explanation of action of Tamburlaine II inside
out, showing through an external association of spirit, feeling and action the physiologised religion
Marlowe diagnosed within Tamburlaine’s body. The Spanish Tragedy complements this heightened
visibility with a third form of spiritual intercession:
And all the saints do sit soliciting
For vengeance…
21
(The Spanish Tragedy, IV.i.33-4)
The third form of spiritual impetus is the saints of Roman Catholic Spain. Their association with
Revenge, and so with Purgatory, brings out the religion underpinning personal action.56
A single example sufficiently illustrates for the present how the three forms of spirituality
explain action in Shakespeare’s histories. Four short scenes after Buckingham has identified the day
of his death as ‘All-Souls’ day’ (V.i.10; 12), in a passage identifying ‘Dream’ as part of a spirit’s arsenal
(V.v.100), in Richard III the Ghost of Prince Edward, of Clarence and of Rivers tell Richard they will ‘sit
heavy on thy soul tomorrow’ (V.v.71; 85; 93). The message is also the tenor of the Ghost of Henry,
Gray, Vaughan, the Princess and Lady Anne to Richard, and the broken spirit of Richard is visible in
his waking soliloquy of doubt and broken phrases (V.iii.131-60). Also visited by the ghosts, but with
encouragement, Richmond awakes in high spirits, the two characters evidencing the causal relation
of spirits to feeling to action. Stressing this, Richmond comments: ‘Methought their souls whose
bodies Richard murdered / Came to my tent and cried on victory. / I promise you, my soul is very
jocund’ (V.vi.184-6). Moving from ‘their souls’ to ‘my soul’ in the context of feeling underlines the
causal connection. The following success and failure of Richmond and Richard stresses it the more.
Notable here is the interchangeability of terms: ‘ghost’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’. The first two remain
sub-species of the third in general discourse. The third, while the focus of more strictly physiological
discourse in the period, was connected to the soul (and so the soul in death: the ghost), as we have
seen. Each term, of course, can denote religion, which the play brings out not only in ‘All-Souls’’, but
also in its presentations of prayer. Following the claim that ‘saints pray’ (IV.iv.75) for Richard’s
demise, the Ghost of Lady Anne says to Richmond that she ‘pray[s] for thee’ (V.vi.120). The
implication is that the Ghost of Anne is a saint; which must be true if, as the play repeatedly asserts,
the Tudors come to the English throne through the providence of ‘God and good angels’ (V.v.129);
but which strikingly implicates the medieval cult of the saints not only in the picture of spirituality
qua human agency and theatrical action, but also in the majesty of Elizabeth I and the operations of
providence.57
Conclusion
56
For Purgatory relating to justice and revenge, see Hutson, pp.275-77 and Rist, Revenge Tragedy, pp. 27-74.
For parallel reading, see Jean-Christophe Mayer, Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion and the Stage
(Basingstoke, 2006), p.56; also Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and English
Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2005), p.
149.
57
22
By the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, there was considerable precedent in English theatre for
thinking of the institution and much else as an expression of the cult of the dead of Rome.58 With
differing emphases as a remarkably high number of contemporaries had observed, Sackville and
Norton, Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare himself had done so before. Hamlet’s response to the
Ghost’s narrative in Act One, Scene Five reproduces an established paradigm of theatre. The
‘perturbèd spirit’ (I.v.183) having disturbed the persons of Act One, Scene One, the explanation of
theatrical action is part of a wider analysis of action in which spirits move persons. Drawing on the
semantics of religion and medicine simultaneously, Act One, Scene Five brings out the ‘purge’ (I.v.13)
of this action; and Hamlet’s pained inactivity following the scene conforms to the Ghost’s claim his
tale might harrowingly freeze him, according to the spiritual logic.59
Yet according to these plays, the cult of the dead might be re-described as a cult of the
living. It is their repeated claim that as agents producing movement, spirits keep bodies from
immobility, itself unsurprisingly associated with death: when the spirit traditionally leaves the body
or, as Marlowe has it, when the spirit and soul want ‘those organnons by which it mooves’.
Emphasising the logic of movement, Marlowe’s description raises one last question. What
value might this explanation of theatre and action have today beyond the historical? In view of the
rise of the New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, the ‘turn to religion’ and the critical practices these
have influenced, the answer is a lot, since these share what Greenblatt identified as a ‘desire to
speak with the dead’, ‘the familiar if unvoiced motive of literary studies’.60 Acknowledging the
embarrassment that buries this motive ‘beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum’, Greenblatt
described a conundrum: ‘If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead
could not speak, I was nevertheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them.’61
Explanation follows: ‘for the dead had contrived to leave traces of themselves, and those traces
make themselves heard in the voices of the living’.62 Yet this explanation requires another: a society
‘that posits an occult network linking all human, natural, and cosmic powers and that claims on
behalf of its ruling elite a privileged access to the linked powers … generates vivid dreams of access
58
The genre omitted from specific consideration in this piece is comedy, but its narratives too evoke
remembrance of the dead. For perspectives, see Rist, ‘Merry, Marry, Mary: Shakespearean Wordplay and
Twelfth Night, in Shakespeare Survey, 62 (2009), 81-91, especially 88-90; Suzanne Penuel, ‘Missing Fathers:
Twelfth Night and the Reformation of Mourning’, in Studies in Philology, 107/1 (Winter, 2010), 74-96; and
Andrew Gordon, ‘The Ghost of Pasquill: The Comic Afterlife and the Afterlife of Comedy on the Elizabethan
Stage’, in The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England, pp. 229-46.
59
For discussion, see Rist, ‘Transgression Embodied’, pp.129-30; also ‘Catharsis as Purgation’, 151.
60
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(Oxford, 1988), p. 1.
61
Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1.
62
Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1.
23
to the linked powers’. That too requiring explanation, Greenblatt avoided further regress by writing
about something else.63
Yet illustrating the problem of causation, the regress is important. How do the dead
‘contrive’ to leave traces? How do societies ‘generate’ dreams? What, in short, energises ‘social
energy’? The answer ‘people’ (or in literature, ‘readers’) is inadequate. What energises them?
As suggested at the outset, the ‘father of sociology’ Emile Durkheim considered this regressinducing question of energetic ‘force’ (in his phrase) a normal reason for human belief in the soul.64
In the ‘hodgepodge of Galenic theory and Vesalian anatomy’ mingling with the ‘corporal
hermeneutic’ of sanctity and corruption, certainly, the Renaissance had spiritual and soulful
answers, especially from Rome’s Church.65 Today, biology, theoretical physics and philosophical
theology – containing continuities with the pre-modern –dispute answers of other kinds, but the
underlying question, the logic of causation, occupies each.66 Whether speaking of evolution, string
theory, energy, or God, causation retains in popular and academic discourse the fascination it held
on the Renaissance stage. Though we may not subscribe to the agency of the dead, the phrase can
serve as a metonym for organnons, energy or indeed (with its attention to motive) character, until
such time as the disputes resolve. Nothing comes of nothing, as Lear observes, while in its emphasis
on analogy, the spiritualism of the Renaissance had the quality of drama.67
63
Thus, only ‘something’ survived of ‘this initial conception’. Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 2
For specific discussion of the belief in terms of causality and the philosophical regress, see Durkheim, p.366.
65
Parker, 1268. As Parker notes, some early modern Protestants also accepted this hermeneutic ‘embraced by
Catholics for centuries’ (p. 1266).
66
Since Darwin and Stephen Hawking are well-known, only ‘philosophical theology’ may need introduction
here, so see Alasdair MacIntyre’s recent explication of Thomistitc philosophy: ‘…this presupposes some source
of existence, some being whose being is not to be understood either as a composite of form and matter or as
one in whom essence and existence are distinct, but as a being whose essential is his esse, God’, in God,
Philosophy, Universities: A History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (London, 2009), p.74.
67
See Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study of Intellectual Patterns (Berkley, Los
Angeles, London, 1972), pp.193-7, especially 197. Much like Greenblatt, Shumaker was embarrassed by and
disavowed the ‘occult’, while recognising its importance ‘for the literary period in which I specialise’ (p. xvi).
Pertaining to the causes of action, Schumaker’s observation that in the Renaissance occult ‘the whole world is
alive’ also merits mention (p. 225). I am grateful to Stanley Wells for his comments on an earlier draft of this
article.
64